gaming | Liam O'Donnell

Four More Essential Plugins for Minecraft School Servers

by liam | Apr 3, 2015 | Battle of the Blocks, education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, Teacher's Guide

About two years ago, I made a promise to write a follow-up to my post: Essential plugins for Minecraft servers. That post never happened. I am a bad blogger. And more than one visitor to this blog and my personal blog told me as much. But that changes today! So, here...

Why I cannot wait to bring my Kano to school

by liam | Oct 4, 2014 | education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, media, Teacher's Guide, video games

Around the world, young computer makers are rejoicing. Kano has arrived. While I am definitely not young, I am right there geeking out with the kids. My own Kano kit arrived last week and I’ve been having a blast making music, designing new versions of Pong and...

Minecraft, the paper clip and me

by liam | Sep 21, 2014 | education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, literacy

This was meant to be a post about using Minecraft Pocket Edition with Grade 1 students. But given the giant paper clip in the room, that post will have to wait.

Instead, I’m going to write about what the recent Microsoft purchase of Minecraft could mean for educators, students and myself. [Click the post title to read more . . . ]

Battle for Minecraft Book 1 off to Beta Readers!

by liam | Aug 17, 2014 | Blog, gaming, works in progress, writing news

I’m having a blast writing Battle for Minecraft, my new series of Minecraft novels for kids. Book 1, Descent into Overworld, is finished and in the hands of my beta readers. I’m always looking for more feedback, so if you want to read the ebook for free...

How those Minecraft books got my students reading . . .

by liam | Aug 1, 2014 | education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, video games, writing news

[This post originally appeared on GamingEdus.org, but I figured folks dropping by here might like to read it too!] If you’ve been near a young Minecraft fan lately, you’ll know that this year’s must-have items aren’t the creeper hoodies or pink...